Jeb Bush

The base doesn’t like him, he’s in favor of Common Core and amnesty, no one outside the Donor Class wants a Bush v. Clinton race, there’s still bad feeling from his brother’s presidency – all of those are problems for Jeb Bush.

But I think another big problem is just how the guy looks. Trump keyed in on this with his “low energy” comments. His overall demeanor doesn’t communicate that he can get anything done.

I think that first impression is that he’s just old and tired. In fact, I think, for some of them, he reminds them of a movie character that is the epitome of old and tired: Norman Thayer, Jr, from On Golden Pond.

See what you think. See if, at first glance, the gallery below just looks like four pictures of the same guy:

I think anyone who looks this much like an 80 year old actor portraying an 80 year old curmudgeon is going to have some serious problems getting anyone excited about his candidacy.

A couple of charts to keep in mind as the political season gets into second gear:

The top one, of course, shows who does and who doesn’t pay the bulk of the taxes. The “who does” is the top 1%. So we have Ms. 1% promising to go after the “rich” as one of the promises of her campaign. That after saying the Clinton Foundation plans to continue to take donations from foreign countries and that her campaign will indeed continue to accept corporate donations. I mean, she’s gotten away with the email scam so why not this too? Accountability – ha! They’re Clintons and accountability is for the “little people”.

The second shows the basic problem we suffer – our government spends more than it takes in. Seems to me that should be a pretty easy problem to solve. But obviously it’s not.

Alternate solution? Well Jeb Bush thinks its a great idea to raise the Social Security retirement age, because, you know, they haven’t screwed retirees enough when it comes to Social Security, so lets see if we can out wait them. He’s not alone. Chris Christie thinks 69 is about right.

Talk of real reform and cutting spending, all redundant programs, the size of the bureaucracy and unneeded departments? Yeah, these are big government guys no matter what lie they tell you. Much easier to kick the SS can down the road by raising the retirement age and having a good portion of those who paid into it for 40 to 50 years die before they receive a penny. Voila – savings! Thank you “suckers”.

Jeb Bush, in what one can describe as either a trial balloon for his candidacy for President (doubtful) or just a shot across the bow of the big government, crony capitalist crowd, says all the right words in a Wall Street Journal piece:

The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.

In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.

We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy’s resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government’s role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

The “right to rise” he talks about is the right of the individual to freely pursue “happiness” in the form economic prosperity without the interference of government. And he’s right, that doesn’t require a “libertarian utopia”. It does require much less government and much less intrusion on the economic side (well, actually, in all areas). Ironically, the resulting economic boom would do two things … increase employment and revenue to the government to help pay off the debt and hopefully help eliminate deficit spending.

What Bush is talking about though is a counter-revolution against the second American revolution (during the FDR era) that undid our first. What he’s suggesting is taking government back to its 18th century roots where it fulfilled the night watchman role, and guarded our freedoms and liberty. Yes, that means laws and law enforcement. Anarchy has never been a libertarian ideal nor was it one our Founders espoused. In fact, it may even mean minimal regulation to ensure force and fraud are punished. But certainly, nothing at all like the regime we have today.

The problem, of course, is the other side of the Leviathan we’ve allowed to grow up among us. That side which has fostered an addiction to other people’s money. And you see the split personality we’ve developed as Americans in the polls that reflect a desire to downsize government but not at the expense of the part from which each person benefits. That makes change in the direction needed very hard because feeding the addiction requires a large and intrusive government.

Our problems right now don’t come from living in a “libertarian utopia” that’s clearly obvious. Instead we’ve become a sort of socialist lite (and catching up fast) version of the failing European social democracies. We’re headed down the very same track, just not on the rocket sled they’re on.

Another irony is even if we did change our ways and begin the dismantle this intrusive regulatory state and go back to our roots, it may be too late. Like it or not, our economic future is coupled with places like Europe, China and the like. Even with such moves here, the tipping point may have already been reached. Instead of dismantling all of this state apparatus the less painful way by gradually standing it down, it may just come crashing down under its own weight.

Politicians have been told for decades we can’t afford what they envisioned and built. They’ve been warned that the state was getting too large, expensive and intrusive and all they’ve done is make it larger, more expensive and more intrusive. But it appears the can has been kicked about as far down the road as it can be kicked. Now someone is going to have to actually pick it up and deal with it.

The question is who? The other question is do Americans have the fortitude and actual belief in the principles of freedom and liberty to make that happen?

Both questions, in my opinion, have less than positive answers … at least at this point in time.

It is bad advice because it conflates the job of legislators with the party’s job of building the party and attracting new voters. And that’s true for both parties. The GOP is supposedly the ideological opposite of the Democrats. That would tell most voters that the GOP most likely to oppose what the Democrats propose in the legislative process.

Guess what – that makes them the party of “no”. That’s their job, if they believe in the ideological principles which supposedly undergird their party. As I recall it, the Democrats had absolutely no problem being the party of “no” when they were in the minority. In fact, they reveled in it. And look where they are now.

He told the group that Republicans are often “too nostalgic” and that the party needs to be more “forward looking” in order to regain national success. Bush reminded the audience that voter demographics are changing and called for the party to become more “youthful” and to abandon their image as “the old white guy party.” “Tone matters,” Bush said, “in twenty or so years our country will have a minority majority.”

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the party must move towards the center. When asked by a student if the party platform needed to become more moderate on social issues, Bush replied, “no.” Rather, he stressed that Republicans “need to apply conservative principles to 21st century problems.”

What Bush describes here is the job of the party, not its legislative representatives. Their job is to represent their constituency and to oppose legislation that isn’t in keeping with the desires of their constituency and ideology. That means, when Democrats are in power, saying “no” a lot.

On the other hand, where is the GOP’s plan to become more ‘youthful’? Where is it’s media campaign to change the “tone”?
Where is the plan to “apply conservative principles to 21st century problems?” Or, more succinctly, why hasn’t the party produced these plans in anticipation of the fight for Congressional seats in 2010?

As far as I can tell, the party is AWOL in all those areas.

In the meantime, the GOP legislators, for the most part, are doing precisely the job they should be doing – if the GOP actually believes in the principles they espouse – and that is being the party of “no”. And if they want to build any credibility at all, they must continue to be the party of “no” (just as the Democrats would be if the positions were reversed). Abandoning that would be the worst mistake they could make.